What is culture?
One of the most striking features of human life is the extraordinary diversity of ways of living in it. In anthropology, it is customary to register this diver-sity by means of the concept of culture. (…) However, the concept of cul-ture itself has obstinately resisted final definition. (…) It is sufficient to note that whatever the sense in which it maybe be employed, it entails a very high level of abstraction. Culture is not something that we can ever expect to en-counter ‘on the ground’. What we find are people whose lives take them on a journey through space and time in environments which seem to them to be full of significance, who use both words and material artefacts to get things done and to communicate with others, and who, in their talk, endlessly spin metaphors so as to weave labyrinthine and ever-expanding networks of symbolic equivalence. What we do not find are neatly bounded and mutual-ly exclusive bodies of thought and custom, perfectly shared by all who sub-scribe to them, and in which their lives and works are fully encapsulated. The idea that humanity as a whole can be parcelled up into a multitude of discrete cultural capsules, each the potential object of disinterested anthro-pological scrutiny, has been laid to rest at the same time as we have come to recognize the fact of the interconnectedness of the world’s peoples, not just in the era of modern transport and communications, but throughout history. The isolated culture has been revealed as a figment of the Western anthropo-logical imagination. It might be more realistic, then, to say that people live culturally rather that they live in cultures.
Ingold, Tim. 1994. What Is Culture? In: Tim Ingold (Hrsg.): 1994. Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology. London; New York: Routledge: 329-349.
Aufgabe 1: Welche Schlussfolgerungen und Interpretationen zum Textabschnitt sind Ihrer Meinung nach richtig, welche falsch?